GitLab triggers between 2 projects

Question

I have a very specific way I need my project to work. I have .bat files being committed to project A with a collection of arguments that need to be actioned by a Python script on project B.

I need project A to be triggered when a new file is committed and then triggering project B to run the script using the variables from the .bat file (sys.argv[1] - [4]

Once project B has been triggered I would like the file in Project A to be deleted so that when the next file is committed to project A there isn’t any conflicting files as there could be up to 100.bat files committed in one day

I have tried simply using power automate to trigger a pipeline once the .bat file is ready however due to organisation blokes I wasn’t able to do so. I have tried going through the GitLab wiki and it seems possible however it’s not clear how my .gitlab-ci.yml is structured on each project for my specific need

Answer 1

For me it's not entirely clear how the bat and python scripts should interact and how the variables should be defined.

But generally you could use a Downstream pipeline, where you retrieve the .bat files from artifacts of the parent pipeline and after the job is finished you could delete the bat-files from the repository.

1. Save bat as pipeline artifacts in project-a:

build_artifacts:
  stage: build
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - bat1.bat
      - bat2.bat
      - bat2.bat

In the project-b pipeline you could retrieve the artifacts like this:

test:
  stage: test
  script:
    - python myscript.py -input bat1.bat
  needs:
    - pipeline: $PARENT_PIPELINE_ID
      job: build_artifacts

Now your python script could use the bat files, because they are downloaded in your pipelines workdir

2. You could trigger project-b pipeline from project-a like this:

trigger_job:
  trigger:
    project: project-group/project-b
  strategy: depend

The strategy: depend makes the job wait for the result of the child pipeline, if you want this.

Finally you could define a job to delete the *bat files, but you would need to create a token to use the Gitlab API, because the 'CI_JOB_TOKEN' has no access to modify the repository.

By using stages or the needs keyword you would have to ensure that the jobs run in the right order